Various ramblings from someone that is usually making something. It might be sewing, knitting, crocheting, card making, quilting, beading, or whatever catches my interest.

June 5, 2007

Yummy socks - yes, another pair

This is my latest finished pair of socks. Trying different indie yarn dyers has been interesting. The colors are so different from one to the next and the base yarns can also be very different. Whatever the base yarn is used for these socks, it's really nice and very, very squishy. This is a Scarlet Fleece yarn in Coffee and Raspberry Pie. It comes in skeins of 100 gms, which is somewhere around 480 yards according to the label. That would make me put this on the finer side of fingering, but it's not. I knit this yarn on a size 0 with 64 total stitches. That's the gauge that I usually use for sport weight yarns. The yarn is thick looking, but quickly thins out once you put some tension to it when knitting. It bounces right back too. I would quickly add this yarn to the list of yarns that I would buy again.

The colors are very subtle and it truly was variegated. I don't mind pooling or flashing, but it is nice when it doesn't happen. Picking a stitch pattern for variegated yarn can be tricky. Will the colors get lost in the pattern? Will the pattern get lost in the yarn? I used another pattern from More Sensational Knitted Socks. This one is called cross-stitch block and it's on page 97. The pattern does look different while knitting. I just looks like a basic checkerboard type pattern. When you stretch it, the pattern stretches to look like interlocking circles. Very nice! I'm having fun using more stitch patterns with variegated yarns. It's more fun to make something beyond basic stockinette socks.